By Louise Knott Ahern
Gannett Michigan
At Michigan’s Isle Royale National Park, a rugged chain of islands in north Lake Superior, a battle is playing out that will impact the entire Park Service.
The wolves of Isle Royale have become critically isolated, forced into generations of inbreeding because the ice bridge that used to allow new animals in from the mainland has all but disappeared during winter months.
Federal officials must decide whether to get involved and attempt to save them or step aside and let nature choose their fate.
No matter what park officials do, the plight of the Isle Royale wolves represents an historic tipping point in National Park Service policy — the first time the agency has considered saving a population of animals that are not suffering from direct human activity.
Isle Royale is considered the first test case in how the challenges of climate change will force a new way of thinking and doing in the nation’s more than 300 parks and wilderness areas.
Climate change, says National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis, changes everything.
***
One of the highest points on Isle Royale is at the top of Mt. Ojibway, a flattened crest above the trees where eagles nest, winds buffet and wild blueberries grow.
From there, you can see all the way to Canada — it’s closer than Michigan — and watch the laughing white caps of Lake Superior pound the rocky shores in every direction.
It’s from way up there that Rolf Peterson listens for signs of life.
Getting there isn’t easy, but even at 64 years old, Peterson barely breaks a sweat despite the terrain. He has made this trek so many times he recognizes individual trees and juneberry bushes.
“You see that radio tower way over there?” he asks, pointing to a steel structure, small and hazy in the distance.
He chuckles with compassion. “It’s actually farther away than it looks.”
Under the canopy of aspen trees and balsam fir, the trail he follows is little more than a rough-hewn path of jagged boulders and exposed roots, the red soil packed hard by the countless footfalls of nature lovers and adventure seekers who visit the island every year.
When the trail breaks above the tree line, he climbs the 50 steps to the top of the radio tower.
He pulls from his 40-year-old backpack a receiver and two small antennas. He slowly swings the antennas left to right, waiting for a sound, listening for something other than static.
It has been more than a month since he has picked up the ping – the sign that Isabelle or Pip, the two radio-collared wolves on the island, are nearby.
He knows they’re not dead. Not yet, at least. He, more than anyone else, would know.
For more than 40 years, he has spent every summer on the island with his wife, Candy, in a cabin with no running water as the chief researcher on a world-renown study through Michigan Technological University called the Wolf-Moose Project.
Now in its 55th year, it’s the longest running study of its kind in the world, and it could happen only at Isle Royale.
The island park is the only place on the entire planet where a major predator and a major ungulate — a fancy biologist’s term for things like deer, elk and moose — live together without the interference of some other species.
Peterson turns the antenna in another direction.
Several minutes pass.
All he hears is silence.
***
Nights on Isle Royale used to have a mournful soundtrack. During the wolves’ heyday, their howls could be heard all night long, an almost guaranteed wildlife experience for Isle Royale visitors.
The nights have grown silent now.
There are only eight adult wolves left on Isle Royale, and they have little to say.
Though not technically native to the island — that is, there’s no evidence of a breeding pack here until shortly after World War II — the wolves here enjoyed a population of 50 in the early 1980s.
The population has steadily declined since then, and those that are left are suffering.
Their backs are bowed and heavy from a genetic deformity, the result of generations of inbreeding, according to Peterson.
He and his research partner, John Vucetich, discovered in 2009 that one-third of the wolf skeletons they’d collected and studied over the years had a condition known as lumbosacral transitional vertebrae. In mainland wolf populations, only 1 in 100 suffer from it.
They have not found a healthy skeleton in 15 years.
In the past two years, only 2 percent of moose deaths on the island have been attributed to wolf kills. In previous years, it averaged 14 percent.
Though several factors have played a role in the wolves’ demise — including a devastating epidemic of canine parvovirus brought to the island in 1981 by a boater and his dog — Peterson and Vucetich assert that the most prominent cause of their plight is something far less direct.
The wolves, they say, are dying because of climate change.
***
Ice coverage on the entire Great Lakes has shrunk 70 percent since 1973 as water temperatures have steadily increased. The water of Lake Superior alone has warmed by 4 degrees in 25 years.
The ice bridge that used to connect Isle Royale to Ontario, and which allowed wolves to walk back and forth, has all but disappeared.
During the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, an ice bridge formed nearly every other year.
Today, ice bridges form roughly once every 15 years.
Peterson wants the National Park Service to try a “genetic rescue” to save the wolves. He wants to bring new wolves to the island to mate with the current packs and literally clean up the gene pool.
What he’s asking for, however, is a bigger deal than just moving a handful of animals around. It is, in fact, one of the biggest and most controversial issues facing the National Park Service, planting Michigan in the center of a broader debate about the effect of climate change on our natural treasures.
It also has sparked a passionate debate in the scientific community, pitting Peterson and Vucetich against longtime friends and colleagues who think intervention would make things only worse for the island.
The director of the National Park Service, Jon Jarvis, is considering three options.
He could do nothing. He could let the wolves die out and let nature run its course.
He could order the genetic rescue Peterson recommends, bringing in some fresh blood to reproduce and repopulate the island.
He could wait until the wolves die out and then bring new wolves to the island, attempting to rebuild the population from scratch.
Jarvis has promised to make a decision sooner rather than later — least before nature decides for him.
Whichever option he chooses, it will have a ripple effect on the entire National Park Service. The agency has adhered to a strict hands-off policy for managing wildlife in much of its 100-year history, only intervening when animals are endangered or suffering from the direct actions of humans.
If Jarvis chooses a genetic rescue, it will signal a sea change in policy — an intervention because of indirect human activity.
The stakes could not be higher, Peterson says.
***
There were a few decades at the beginning of the 20th century when moose on Isle Royale partied and indulged.
They were alone on the island — a major ungulate with no predator. Lynx were long gone, and wolves had not yet arrived.
Isle Royale’s vast, undisturbed food supply fueled an uncontrolled population boom.
In 1929, a biologist who visited the island estimated the moose population at 3,000 — unsustainable by anyone’s measure.
Experts predicted a crash, and they were right. By 1934, the party was over. The island’s balsam fir had been devastated and the moose began to starve.
Within just a few years, the population dropped to roughly 400 or 500.
There are places on Isle Royale where the balsam fir still struggle to recover from the moose overpopulation.
Time is critical, Peterson says. Not just for wolves, but the entire ecosystem of the island.
Without wolves — the only large predator on the island — the moose population would explode again.
With too many moose, plant life would suffer and die, and the habitats of other animals would be destroyed.
A genetic rescue doesn’t only save the animals, Vucetich says. It saves an entire ecosystem.
“The one thing on which there is universal agreement,” Vucetich says, “is that wherever there are large ungulates like moose or deer or elk, there needs to be a top predator to maintain ecosystem integrity. Absolutely, positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt, we know the moose are capable of damaging the forest. The only uncertainty is how quickly they will.”
Peterson understands genetic rescue is a scary concept to some. It challenges the longstanding philosophy that nature is always right and humans are always wrong.
Peterson, however, sees it differently.
“This is an opportunity,” he says, “to inject positive human influence for once.”
But as Peterson learned in June this year, that’s a tough argument to make.
***
David Mech is founder of the International Wolf Center in Minnesota and — along with Peterson — is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on wolf biology.
He was the original researcher on the Wolf-Moose project back in 1958. Isle Royale and its wolves are dear to his heart, he says.
Yet he is adamantly opposed to rescuing them.
“We’ve been crying wolf about the wolves on Isle Royale for quite some time,” he told an audience at a forum on the issue at the University of Minnesota in June. “We’ve had a long history of claiming these wolves are going to go extinct. Maybe someday that will be right. … However, this population has survived, this inbred population has survived for 60-plus years. Do we really think it can’t survive another few?”
One after another, more speakers outlined their opposition to genetic rescue.
Wolf and moose aren’t native to the island, one speaker argued. Moose didn’t arrive until the beginning of the 20th century, either by swimming from Ontario or — as a handful of people have suggested — were brought there by humans. Wolves didn’t arrive until after World War II.
It would violate national park policy to attempt to save animals that aren’t native to a region, said Tim Cochrane, park superintendent at Grand Portage National Monument in Minnesota and the author of a book about the American Indian history on Isle Royale.
There is also the reality of island ecosystems, he said. Species die out all the time on islands — including Isle Royale. Caribou and lynx used to be the primary mammals, but they died out long before wolves and moose showed up.
And then there’s this nagging question, Cochrane says.
“If (wolves) are so common now,” he asks, “why were they so rare in the past when ice and access was easier?”
The question gets to the heart of why genetic rescue on Isle Royale is dangerous, he says.
If wolves and moose are not part of Isle Royale’s natural state, he argues, we need to leave nature alone to reset the balance.
***
Cochrane and other critics calls call genetic rescue the slippery slope of manipulation. What if it doesn’t work the first time? Do we do it again? How many times?
Restraint is difficult, he said. Especially when we’re talking about a species as iconic as wolves. But it’s what the Wilderness Act requires of us.
If nature wants to save these wolves, critics say, it will find a way.
***
The Park Service won’t make a decision until officials have finished gathering public comments and have a chance to review several scenarios about how life without wolves could impact the island, said park Superintendent Phyllis Green.
Nature gave them some breathing room this year in the form of two or three wolf pups. Officials don’t yet know how many pups there are — either two or three. If they survive the winter, they have a good chance of reaching adulthood.
They give us time but not much, said Isle Royale Superintendent Phyllis Green. But even if they survive and even if they eventually reproduce, they’re just perpetuating diluted, inbred genes, Green said.
The Park Service won’t make a decision until officials have finished gathering public comments and have a chance to review several scenarios about how life without wolves could impact the island, Green said.
One major factor in the the Park Service’s decision will be not just the role of wolves in the ecosystem as it exists today on Isle Royale, but also what visitors expect there.
The wolf is an iconic animal. For some, she said, it is the very face of Isle Royale, the symbol of all that is wild and pure about the island. Which is why the idea of letting them go is so difficult.
“There are people who say, ‘I want my children to see what I’ve seen here,’” Green said. “I hope they can. The island will always be here. The question is, how heavily does man lay its hand on this island? People want you to intervene because we don’t ever like to feel helpless in the face of change.”
But change is already upon us, said Jarvis, director of the National Park Service. We must adapt where we can, save what we can, and use our parks to educate people about the changing world.
But we also must accept that we’ve already lost control. There are things happening that cannot be undone.
Someday, there will be no glaciers at Glacier National Park.
Someday, the seas will rise and swallow the Everglades.
Someday, no matter what we do, many of the things we cherish most will be gone.
And all we can do, he said, is learn to say good-bye.